Path to Google summer of code
I will not waste much time telling you about it. You can read about it on its official website which is pretty detailed: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/
It was second year of my college. I had an idea about Google summer of code through various Facebook groups and being a part of it seemed to be a far fetched goal, near to impossible. I always wanted to gain the title someday, but I had not thought that it would be this soon. The organisations are usually announced in the month of February. I recently got free from a project, so I was searching on new things to take up and suddenly it cracked to me, let’s explore about Google summer of code. I found out that the organisations were announced and they had given a list of ideas. Before the actual student application started, there were 15 days left. In the application period, students are expected to give a proposal on the idea which they like from the given list of ideas or any new idea which they want to promote.
To my surprise, I found out OpenCV was a part of the list of organisations. I had already been working on computer vision, so i got really excited. To my surprise, I even saw there were a list of projects which I had some experience with. There was still time left for student applications. I could have waited for the deadline, but instead I just dived straight into it. This was the best decision I ever made…….
This brings to our first and the most important tip about Google summer of code, which is start early. Most of the students wait for the student submission deadlines to open, but don’t wait for them. As soon as the organisations release the list of projects, just jump on to those. Try to find out the projects which interest you the most. Once you have found the projects and the. organisations, try getting in touch with the mentors of those organisations, either through email or through some slack groups which are present.
Now the question comes, what do you actually write on those groups ?
- Introduce yourself, and write that you have interest about one of the ideas. You can even give your own ideas helpful for the organisation.
- You can directly reach out to mentors and ask what next steps you should take. The process of each organisation might be different.
- If you can prepare a proposal in a day’s team. Then prepare a proposal and submit a draft and ask the mentors to review it. — this is what I did.
As soon as I submitted my proposal, I got a reply from the mentor of the project, that he will review the proposal. I was totally stupefied. In a group of so many people, getting a reply from one of the actual mentors of OpenCV was a big thing for me then. The stars were aligning, and a shot in the dark was seeming to be a distant reality now. This can happen to anybody who is willing to put in the efforts to actually do the work of finding the organisations and the projects which they are really passionate about and then actually writing the proposal. It was 12 days before the submission deadline and my prospective mentor reviewed my documents with comments on the lines of concern. I made the changes and then submitted it again to him for re-review. This process continued for 3–4 cycles until I reached the final draft. By this time, the student application period hadn’t even started yet.
As soon as the period started, I submitted my proposal and the rest is history. I did not have any prior experience in contributing to the open source community, not an extremely good looking github profile. But I had an edge in knowing things about computer vision. I used to use the OpenCV library for my research projects and getting a chance to contribute a part of code to it which the world would be using was extremely exciting. This edge is very important for you to crack google summer of code. One must have some previous work to showcase and instill a trust that you can actually bring the project you take up to completion.You can even start before the organisations are announced. Mostly, the organisations are same as those of last year. So you can see their last years’ projects and think of some ideas through which you can contribute to organisation and may even get in touch with the repository maintainers and start making pull requests to the repository even before google summer of code.
Contributing to open source is like a marathon and not sprint. Being a part of open source community helps you understand how software development actually works. Being a part of google summer of code in my 2nd year, not only helped me grow my software development skills, but also helped me during my internship at Amazon next year. I already knew about unit testing, code coverage and git which are the most important parts of software development.
We finally have some key takeaways from my journey:
- Gain some knowledge about the process and organisations.
- Shortlist some organisations doing work in your areas of interest
- Start contributing to those organisations as soon as you can.
- Get in tough with the potential mentors through slack or emails and make your presence known in the community.
- Make sure you have the desired knowledge and interest to drive the project to completion.
- Get as much feedback as you can before actually submitting it.
Following these steps might not guarantee but increase your chances of getting selected by manifolds. All the best for your open source journey……
